Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/November-December2014

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 9, November–December 2014
by The Interior, Ocaasi, Sadads

2014 came to a close with great progress at The Wikipedia Library. We feel we have an amazing core team of organizers fueling the work of a growing number of trusted community volunteer leaders. Our outreach efforts have yielded over twenty resource partners and continue to grow in pace and value. Since announcing the possibility of global Wikipedia Library branches, we have received requests from two dozen communities that want to get started - we look forward to diving head first into that process come January. The TWL team wishes that you had lovely and refreshing winter or summer solstices, celebrated happy holidays, and took some well-needed breaks. We wish you the best in 2015!

Library highlights

Overview: New partnerships

Free books!

McFarland & Company, an academic publisher based in the United States, has offered free e-books to Wikipedia editors. McFarland has a large title list covering many subject areas, and specializes in topics often underrepresented in academic literature, such as television, graphic novels, video games, sports, and more: McFarland project page.
Pelican Books, the United Kingdom non-fiction imprint of Penguin Books, has made fifty of its e-books available through the library. TWL thanks Johnathan Cardy (WMUK) for organising and coordinating this donation. See the project page for more information.
Also the work of Cardy, the Public Catalogue Foundation has offered art books to editors. This resource is already filled, but watch the project page in case more spots become available.

More journal access

The United Kingdom's Royal Society of Chemistry has opened up a limited number of accounts to its "Gold" journal access program. The RSC's Wikipedian in Residence, Andy Mabbett, was instrumental in making this partnership happen. Accounts are available at the project page.
Elsevier, one of the world's largest academic publishers, has opened a pilot partnership with TWL, offering thirty accounts in three disciplines: Health & Life Sciences, Social & Behavioral Sciences, and Physical Sciences. As the number of accounts in limited, and demand is high, accounts will only be awarded to editors with an established track record in the subject area. However, editors are encouraged to join the waitlist in case of expansion. See the project page for more.
Adam Matthew Digital is a collection of curated primary source documents and images, organized around specific topic areas. Although this partnership has been open since the summer, it has seen limited signups. We encourage editors to check it out, and spread the word to relevant WikiProjects if possible. See the project page for more.

Introducing new TWL account coordinators

Saehrimnir has been active since 2005 and is an administrator at wikidata and the German Wikipedia. Saehrimnir will be helping to coordinate the De Gruyter and Royal Society of Chemistry donations.
Chris Troutman is a former Education Program Campus Ambassador. After bringing people with access to research resources to Wikipedia, he's now bringing Wikipedians access to resources. You can frequently find Chris answering questions at the Articles for Creation help desk.

Interested in helping coordinate? Sign up!

Coordinators wanted

In addition to managing account donations, we have more organizational-level positions we want to fill with excited volunteers. Let us know if one of these roles seems like a good fit for you!

Outreach coordinator - Scale our blogging, social media, conferences, events, webinars, and presentations
Technical coordinator - Oversee library tool development, gadgets, browser extensions, and userscripts
Partner coordinator - Contact dozens of in-demand publishers using our proven promotion methods
Global coordinator - Help TWL reach the next 280 languages to start branches in their own communities

Interested in taking on a leadership role with TWL? Sign up!

Conference highlights

In mid-October, TWL spoke at MARAC (Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference). "Wikipedia: Getting involved and increasing discoverability" reviewed examples of how to use Wikipedia to make digital collections and finding aids more accessible, including editing content, embedding citations, hiring a Wikipedian-in-Residence, creating student internships, and evaluating the success of a Wikipedia project. Rebecca Hopman from the Corning Museum of Glass moderated and the panel included speakers from Universities of Maryland and Pittsburgh in addition to Jake Orlowitz from TWL. In short, archivists are interested in working with Wikipedia too!
In early November, TWL was able to attend the Charleston Conference, a meeting of academic publishers, vendors, and academic librarians held annually in Charleston, South Carolina. We presented to a full house on our projects, along with Damon Zucca from Oxford University Press, Suzanne Kemperman from OCLC, and Chris Ferguson, an academic librarian from Murray State University. The experience was very encouraging; the Charleston Conference is a much smaller, more intimate affair than other library conferences, and offered many opportunities for informal discussions on the future of libraries and academic publishing, how students' research habits have changed since the advent of the internet, and how Wikipedia fits in to these trends. It also led to partnership discussions with several publishers. One of these, McFarland Publishing, is now up and running (see here). TWL attended several presentations that related to our projects. Topics of interest to editors include the new ROAD database being developed by the ISSN International Centre and UNESCO (see here). TWL was encouraged by several attendees at the conference remarking that they were happy to see Wikipedia/Wikimedia represented there, and saying that better dialogue between knowledge communities needs to be cultivated. We were also very happy to see publishers seeking us out for discussion; in the past the process has usually been in the other direction!

Upcoming conference calendar

ALA Midwinter Chicago: TWL and OCLC will host a program (January 31, 2015) giving an overview of what has happened in their partnership over the past year and what is upcoming. On the list is updates from the 2013 ALA midwinter meeting, ALA 2014, Wikimania 2014, our Libraries and Wikipedia webinar, Charleston Conference, CNI conference, our Scholarly editing on Wikipedia webinar, Merrilee Proffitt's introductory sessions with archivists, Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, TWL publisher donations, and work towards a functioning full text reference tool based on the OCLC KnowledgeBase API. We will also have libraries talk about their involvement hosting editors and sharing best practices for working on Wikipedia.

We have video! Full talks from this year's outreach

IEG Grants

The Wikimedia Grantmaking department, through its Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) and Project and Events Grants (PEG), is funding several library-related projects in 2015. If you've a library-related project you'd like to propose, please do so! Here's a summary of recently approved projects:

Art + Feminism (IEG and PEG)

Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building, and the related Art+Feminism Editathons - grantees plan to build a more robust framework for the successful Art+Feminism series of editathons. Their plans include working closer with libraries and librarians to better facilitate events.

Two Telugu projects (IEG)

Making Telugu content accessible - this grant will go towards making the Telugu-language content in the Digital Library of India more accessible to readers Telugu text, greatly aiding Telugu Wikipedia editors in their searches for reliable sources.
Digitization of Important Libraries Book Catalog in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana - This digitization drive aims to get more freely usable Telugu content digitized, searchable, and downloadable, which will benefit all of the Telugu-language Wikimedia projects.

Open Access Resource Spotlight: ROAD

The International Standard Serial Number International Centre, apart from their important work assigning unique identifiers to the world's periodical publications, has partnered with UNESCO to provide a powerful new search engine for open access journals, conference proceedings, monographic series and academic repositories. The platform, called ROAD (Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources) combines several existing open access databases into a "one-stop" search engine for open access documents. Those familiar with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) will see a strong similarity in results for journals, however, ROAD has combined the DOAJ database with a number of other large databases such as Scopus, Linguistics Abstracts, EconLit, Medline, and others.

ROAD offers a pleasant user experience, providing tools like a map-based directory - useful for finding results in your geographical area, and a good advanced search. We encourage editors to poke around!

Spotlight: TWL and JSTOR make an impact on Persian Wikipedia

This months' post was written by a recipient of JSTOR's access donation and first appeared on the Wikimedia Blog. If you would like to write about your experience with a partner resource, please contact User:Astinson (WMF).

Last month, the Wikipedia Library announced another round of digital resource access partnerships to the Wikimedia community. These partnerships allow experienced editors in the community and from all around the globe to access research materials behind a paywall in order to advance our goal of creating and sharing a summary of all human knowledge.

One of the longest lasting and most useful donation partnerships has been with journal archive JSTOR, which saw significant participation from non-English editors. We have seen even more participation from around the world as JSTOR expanded their donations, most prominently from languages like German, Spanish, French and Persian. We had expected uptake from the larger Wikimedia communities operating in European languages, but the Persian community pleasantly surprised us.

To find out more, we asked one of our most active Persian editors with a JSTOR account, User:4nn1l2, why he finds the Wikipedia Library important to his work:

Distribution of Persian speakers in the Middle East and central Asia / پراکندگی فارسی‌زبانان در خاورمیانه و آسیای مرکزی

Already larger than Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish Wikipedias, Persian Wikipedia is now the largest Wikipedia of the Middle Eastern languages, and is aspiring to become one of the largest and highest-quality Wikipedias of the world. Like its other Middle Eastern counterparts, Persian Wikipedia has developed mostly around political, religious, and historical topics rather than scientific or medical ones. This may be because Middle East is a fairly small region with a long and rich history. Just consider that Persia, now called Iran, has nearly 2,600 years of recorded history; all three major Abrahamic religions have their origins in the Middle East. Consequently, the humanities play an important role in Persian Wikipedia.

Most of my contributions to Persian Wikipedia are about literature and history of Iran and Islam. The journal Iranian Studies, published by Routledge, is one the most reliable sources concerning that cultural heritage. I had access to this journal through my university library, which was subscribed to Taylor & Francis Online. However, things changed when the international sanctions against Iran expanded and included banking transactions. Subscription fees could not be paid and access to digital libraries became almost impossible one by one. Although there are always some loopholes or backdoors to circumvent the sanctions, the growing difficulties reduced my motivation to work on Wikipedia for free. I found myself always asking fellow Wikipedians who live abroad to send me various individual articles; only God knows how frustrating that was! However, thanks to the Wikipedia Library, I received JSTOR access, which incorporates Iranian Studies; this new access allowed me to continue my work on articles like Kelidar, the longest Persian novel, and the biography of Husayn Va'iz-i Kashifi, a prolific prose-stylist and influential preacher of the Islamic world. I have not nominated them for the Good Article reviews yet, but am going to do so in the near future and try to promote them.

Alexander III of Macedon - "Great" or "Accursed"? / اسکندر مقدونی: «کبیر» یا «گجسته»؟

In my opinion, JSTOR access is a must for Persian Wikipedia editors, not just due to the lack of reliable sources in Iran or Afghanistan, but because of the systematic bias and censorship that is so prevalent among books published in these countries. Leaving controversial religious subjects untouched, let me point out my first-hand experience of a historical matter: Iranians (Persians) are so proud of their ancient history that it is nearly impossible to find an academic book about Alexander the Great, or as Iranians call him "Alexander the Accursed," just because he ousted the Achaemenid Empire from power about 2300 years ago. This is not because of the government, but people themselves who would boycott the publisher that dares to publish such books. I was going to write a thorough article about Alexander the Great, but after facing such a hindrance, I had to content myself with just translating the English Wikipedia article. I'm sure there are lots of other similar, untold and unheard stories. It's perfectly clear that JSTOR access and the Wikipedia Library can’t be waved like magic wands to solve all the problems, but they can give editors some small tools to begin remedying the situation. These can beneficially provide reliable sources for volunteer editors who devote their time to build a better world by sharing their knowledge.

I even consider the Wikipedia Library a helpful project to counter the systemic bias in English Wikipedia itself. While every river or hill in North America or Europe has its own article, many vital issues concerning developing countries have not been covered. By getting global editors like me free access to rich digital libraries, we will be even more encouraged to write decent articles about our culture and geography in your language.

4nn1l2, Persian Wikipedia editor

Bytes in Brief

100,000+ free History of Medicine images from The Wellcome Library: [1]
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) opens: [2]
Gates Foundation announces "world’s strongest policy on open access research": [3]
Connecting WikiData and ODNB: [4]
Journal Nature announces 'read-only open access': [5]
Mellon Foundation funds new Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) program to digitize hidden collections: [6]
Creative Commons publishes "Open Content - A Practical Guide to Using Creative Commons Licences: [7]
Freebase to shut down and transfer content to WikiData: [8]
National Library of Norway offers digital library admission to Wikipedians outside of Norway: [9]
Worth reading: "Factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education": [10]
WikiData becoming a hub for scientific research data: [11]